Washington Post goes from elitist paper to neo-con propaganda rag. Two editorials in yesterday's Washington Post point to the slide of that paper into the realm of neo-con propaganda spinning. Although this web site has studiously avoided commenting on the Don Imus matter, the Post equated the radio host's disparaging racist remarks about the Rutgers University Women's Basketball team to his previous calling of Vice President Dick Cheney a "war criminal."
Message to the Post: using racist and chauvinistic language in one case is not the same as referring to Cheney for what he and his ilk are -- war criminals. This editor has called Cheney and Bush war criminals. To suggest that such a reference is the same as using racist comments is pure and utter nonsense, which is now the order of the day from the Post.
Nevertheless, Imus's career and relevance has been over for some time. It should be remembered that the 66 year old deejay started out on radio in 1968. To put things in perspective, Imus's radio contemporaries at that time included Arthur Godfrey, Wolfman Jack, Joe Pyne, Howard W. Morgan, Long John Nebel, Gene Burns, Jean Shepherd, Bill Ballance, Barry Farber, Barry Gray, and Morton Downey, Jr. Imus's radio colleague at WNBC in New York was Soupy Sales. In other words, Imus should be stuffed and put into a radio museum.
The Post also lashes out at Eritrea for supporting Islamist "terrorists" in Somalia and lauds the efforts of Assistant Secretary of State for African Affairs Jendayi Frazer in threatening Eritrea with sanctions. What the Post will not tell its readers is that Frazer is a known supporter of American dictator clients from Rwanda's Paul Kagame, to Uganda's Yoweri Museveni, and Ethiopia's Meles Zenawi.
The Post will not report that Frazer's close colleague in Addis Ababa, the Ethiopian capital, is U.S. Army Col. Richard Orth, the U.S. Defense Attache, whose resume includes logistics support for Kagame in the shoot down of the Rwandan presidential aircraft in 1994 (which has now earned top Rwandan government officials a criminal indictment from France) and subsequent U.S. military aid for his multiple invasions of Zaire/Congo. Genocide resulted from these covert operations.
Orth was the Defense Attache in Rwanda during the onset of the Kagame regime and then he moved to Kampala, Uganda where he provided similar services for Museveni, including the destabilization of Sudan through support for the Sudan People's Liberation Army (SPLA), which is now part of the coalition government in Khartoum under attack by U.S.-supported guerrillas operating from Ethiopia and Chad.
This is largely Orth's and Frazer's handiwork. Although Frazer was officially with the Kennedy School of Government at Harvard during most of the Clinton administration, she worked closely with Orth and the Pentagon's and Defense Intelligence Agency's Africa bureaus.
So too are the three U.S. secret concentration camps now in Ethiopia. According to our Ethiopian opposition sources, the main camp is located at the Ethiopian airbase at Debre Zeit, near Addis Ababa. The two others are in the Ogaden region of eastern Ethiopia and in Tigre Province, which borders Eritrea in the north. Tigre is the home of the Ethiopian dictator Meles. The camps are housing detainees from 19 countries, including Sweden, France, and Canada and a number of Ethiopian opposition members, including ethnic Oromos, Ogadenis, and other minority groups.
On November 17-19, 2006, WMR reported the following on U.S. arming of Somali Islamists and Ethiopia: "The arming by the U.S. of both the Ethiopians and Somalis in preparation for war is nothing new. In fact, WMR and this editor has reported extensively on the past and current covert intelligence activities of the U.S. Defense Attache in Addis Ababa, Ethiopia, U.S. Army Colonel Richard Orth. Described as the 'Oliver North of Africa' by a high-ranking French military intelligence officer who has served in Africa, Orth has coddled a number of U.S. dictators in Africa.
He was present in Rwanda the day after U.S.-supplied surface-to-air missiles struck the Rwandan presidential aircraft on April 6, 1994, assassinating the Hutu presidents of Rwanda and Burundi and triggering Rwandan and Zairian/Congolese civil wars that took the lives of over 5 million Africans. Orth, as Defense Attache in Kigali, Rwanda, lorded over the transformation of that country from a French-speaking nation to a U.S. client state with English-speaking refugees from Uganda put in charge.
Orth then proceeded to take over as U.S. Defense Attache in Uganda where he cemented the U.S. military presence in that nation. He then moved on to Addis Ababa where, as Defense Attache, he coddled the Meles dictatorship and helped prepare Ethiopia's incursion into Somalia, bolstered the U.S. military positions in Djibouti and Somaliland, tilted U.S. policy to favor Ethiopia in its border war with Eritrea, coordinated Horn of Africa intelligence activities with his Israeli counterpart in Addis Ababa, and helped plan past Ugandan military forays into the Democratic Republic of the Congo, southern Sudan, and the Central African Republic.
The Post's deputy foreign editor Peter Eisner has just co-written a book, "The Italian Letter," about the forged Niger documents that were used to lead the U.S. to war in Iraq. In the book, Eisner gives a virtual free pass to arch-neocon Michael Ledeen and his dealings with Iranian con man Manucher Ghorbanifar in helping to cook up the scheme.
Eisner also suggests that the U.S. ambassador to Italy at the time, Mel Sembler, was out of the loop on the Ledeen-Ghorbanifar meetings. In fact, Sembler, as much a neocon as Ledeen, was not only aware of the meetings, according to our sources, but helped set them up. Eisner quotes an unnamed U.S. embassy source in Rome as stating that Sembler "blew a gasket" when he found out about Ledeen's meetings in Rome.
Sembler more likely blew a gasket when the details of the Niger forgeries and the role played by the neocon cabal in the Bush administration, a grouping that includes Ledeen, the Pentagon's Harold Rhode, and Sembler as charter members, became public.
